Sketchbook Thread of Krystian Polak

#1

Thankfully to Rebeccak letting me know I can create my own thread here. That is great :slight_smile:

I would like to do some practice with drawing human themes and hope I can get some response from more experienced artists in this field if somebody can find second or two.

I started do digital portrait of well know person. That is always good test since if executed with confidence that person should be easy to recognise :wink: I am doing this from reference photo and would like to put attention to general shading and details.

Here are two first stages: sketch/bloking and some smoothing/detailing.

Regards,

K.Polak

#2

krpolak,

Welcome aboard! :slight_smile: It’s great to see your thread up, I look forward to seeing a lot of your work here. :slight_smile:

One thing I recommend with your first sketch is to introduce more midtones ~ even adding a color layer on top of all layers and setting the blending mode to color. Then play with the hue / saturation of the color layer and the opacity. The key to painting is to work from dark to light ~ and not to go too light, even when you are painting light skin tones.

Looking forward to seeing more of your work!

Cheers, :slight_smile:

~Rebeccak

#3

Thanks Rebeccak. I could see after having break that the face was a bit flat. As you adviced I did extra layer and tried to shade half of the face, still allowing to have a bit light play. Hope that helps, however I would like to keep face relatively lighten up.

Possibly good excercise would be to build whole thing with large strokes of tones first :wink:

Here is progress.

Also one though came for me: drawing from a reference is easy and very difficult at the same time. Easy because most of the things are solved already and its only matter of copying it. And difficult becasue level of likeness is set so high that even slight difference might look huge. I recon its good excerise to start to recongise thing that seems obvious.

Regards,

K.Polak

#4

krpolak,

This is starting to look better! Do you have any updates? :slight_smile:

Cheers,

~Rebeccak

#5

Thanks Rebeccak,

Yes, I am still working on that, I did quite a work around eyes. However I had to take a break due to load of work. And then I was caugth by acrylics and somehow days passed :wink:

However I have in my mind some spice for this drawing, some creative additions. I will come back to that very soon :slight_smile:

Regards,

K.Polak

#6

Here we are, next stage.

As you can see I worked on face details. Also I decided to make a creative move and did the first “sketch” of my idea. Obviously taking into account the setup will require thinging again about toning, colour etc.

Regards,

K.Polak

#7

krpolak,

Nice update! I think the main thing atm I’m noticing that needs improvement is the depth of the face, which seems quite flat ~ try situating the eyes within their sockets, adding more shading there and to the cheeks. Also the outlining of the tubes is really making those a bit flat as well ~ particularly where they connect to the head.

Hope this helps. :slight_smile:

Cheers,

~Rebeccak

#8

All right. Have been away from here recently. Real life media kept me busy, but now is time to finish that one.

In the meanwhile I defined my idea, which for first sight might look completly different, but is not that far away. Still havent touched face shading. First I must precise helmet form then face will come as a result of that.

Regards,

K.Polak

#9

a nice thread - looking forward to more updates on this one :slight_smile:

#10

Thanks Magda. BTW, you have few nice models in your portfolio. Really good job :slight_smile:

Ok, I polished helmet, next step will be face shading according to new lighting situation. I am planning add some drama.

Regards,

K.Polak

#11

krpolak,

Good to see your progress on this! I like the current image better than the previous wires ~ the main thing I would suggest is softening the jaggy edges about the edge of the face / head garment ~ and adding a bit of depth to the brown / negative spaces behind the figure.

Cheers, :slight_smile:

~Rebeccak

#12

I haven’t had much time to work on that, but at least I tried to join face and helmet. Still more face shading to come.

Regards,

K.Polak

#13

The best way to refresh an eye is take a break :wink:

Regards,

K.Polak

#14

Further face features development.

Regards,

K.Polak

#15

Hi krpolak, very nice work! You should define the outline of the nose - mouth part more. It is a little soft there.

Keep it up!

#16

ISSsss…

Thanks Thomas. There is need for some work in this area, but generally its going to be sort of what is now, soft light. I would not like to exagerate there and to prevent that I recon softness is necessary.

Regards,

K.Polak

#17

Extra detail.

Regards,

K.Polak

#18

All right, here is the next stage. That is the point where fun starts :slight_smile:

As you see adding electric bolts on dark background generates a lot of contrast. And contrast is what atracts viewer attention. Because I still would like to keep focus on the face I must adjust lighting to get good contrast balance within frame.

Secondly I should add bluish light at the back of armour to keep lighting realistic. Also I should make better work with colour scheme in general. As you see I didnt do final sketch before major work, which is good practice, so now I have to redo things few times. However this project is sort of experimenation and it flows from idea to idea :wink:

Finally I will think about small, tricky detail to spice the whole thing up. Hope you enjoy so far :slight_smile:

Regards,

K.Polak

#19

Wow O: great work on the eyes!

It looks so much better now that you added more depth.

#20

Thanks Talaria!

Final stages are comming very soon. In the meanwhile I have done few quick sketches from life. I put here since its the same workflow and anyway that’s my sketchbook :slight_smile:

Regards,

K.Polak